Every Friday morning, Bon Appétit senior staff writer Alex Beggs shares weekly highlights from the BA offices, from awesome new recipes to office drama to restaurant recs, with some weird (food!) stuff she saw on the internet thrown in. It gets better: If you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get this letter before everyone else.
Optimism baking
I made Chris Morocco’s buckwheat banana bread at the start of the week, finally. I’d had it pinned for years. I snuck the espresso powder from the frosting into the batter, which is the closest I’ll ever get to working for NASA. I love the way doctoring up a recipe makes you feel like some kind of Mensa genius. “You know, the soup was perfect as-is, but I added a bay leaf and a cat hair and it simply pushed things over the top!”
Bake it: Buckwheat Banana Cake
It was a long week
This week in my (somewhat) quarantined home, an all-out fight broke out about apples. Not like, some Lord of the Flies stuff, but an argument resulting from trying to convince a high-risk loved one that the old way of daily shopping—three avocados here to “ripen on deck,” a “backup” loaf of bread there—is putting us at a potentially higher risk, putting others in the city at risk, and frankly unnecessary considering our stocked pantry. That maybe even this high-risk person...shouldn’t be doing the shopping at all.
It didn’t work. Suddenly the boring, chore-y act of popping in a store and feeling a few ‘cados for ripeness seems to represent all that’s left of free will.
And I know I’m not the only one in this unnecessary feud. It’s been written about in The New Yorker. A friend asked me if I had any good talking points she could give her dad, who’s running errands around town like it’s Normal Times. “They didn’t work!” I lamented. I’m exhausted and unfunny right now. But I’m hoping for the best.
The pantry depths
This week, Bon Appétit staffers mined their pantries for treasure and this is what they excavated:
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